We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

My reply is that I would like to teach Freshman English about as much as I liked taking Freshman English. I did not like the Junior Literary Critic model being used in high school and college to teach composition.

In addition, I would not like to teach Generation Snowflake, which apparently expects an A for showing up in classs.

Wise words from way back before they got the idea that literary theorists would be good at teaching composition. Sadly, when the literary theorists were given the job to justify their existence, the students were sentence to writing about what the literary theorists liked which was a hypocrisy and turned many a student a way from reading literature or developing their writing skills.

QUOTE:

Nothing can be more hypocritical than for young
people who are still in the rudiments of literature to be forced
into pronouncing objective judgments as to the worth of
literature. Students instinctively feel this, and resent all
attempts to get them to pretend a knowledge which they do
not possess. On the other hand, they are beginning to be
dissatisfied with judging books and other works of art on the
ground of mere impulsive like or dislike. It is time, then, for
something less ambitious than criticism, and more thoughtful
than caprice.

Interpretation rather than criticism.

--Freshman Rhetoric, John Rothwell Slater, Ph.D. Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Rochester, (1913)

I was thinking of Slater, but didn't want to bother digging through his book. Thanks for doing so.

A neighbor and family friend was a Rochester graduate. As she attended Rochester in the late 1930s- and Slater taught until 1942- she may well have taken Slater for English. She was a sensible, down-to-earth person. I wonder if in high school I had informed her of my dislike of the Junior Literary Critic model used in English classes, if she might have had Slater's Freshman Composition book to loan me.

“Jared, you really need to watch the language,” said Mrs. Meese, but since there were plenty of bad words in Tim O’Brien’s book, which was assigned reading, she couldn’t muster much outrage. What was interesting, though, was that Jared had a complete mastery of the Morgan Freeman movie. He could give a succinct off-the-cuff plot summary, and yet he’d done practically nothing on the analysis forms.

Mrs. Kennett wasn’t to blame, though—she taught what the Language Arts Department at Lasswell High School told her to teach. And the Language Arts Department wasn’t to blame either—filling out analysis sheets about The Things They Carried was standard operating procedure at American high schools. The people to blame were educational theorists who thought that it was necessary for all students to do literary criticism. If you want unskilled readers to read, I thought, make them copy out an interesting sentence every day, and make them read aloud an interesting paragraph a day. Twenty minutes, tops. If you want them to take pleasure in longer works, fiction or nonfiction, let them read along with an audiobook. Don’t fiddle with deadly lit-crit words like tone and mood. And don’t force them to read war books about shaking hands with corpses.

An author doesn't like the Junior Literary Critic model. That should be a hint for our Ed School theorists.

Writing was one of the casualties. Colleges had long taught English composition. But how do you do research on composition? The professors who taught math could be required to do original math, the professors who taught history could be required to write scholarly articles about history, but what about the professors who taught rhetoric or composition? What should they do research on? The closest thing seemed to be English literature. [3]

And so in the late 19th century the teaching of writing was inherited by English professors. This had two drawbacks: (a) an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer, any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b) the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that's what the professor is interested in.

High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserable high school experiences were sown in 1892, when the National Education Association "formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course."

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